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Virtualization Solution with NITConnect

How Customers Are Cutting Costs and Building Value with NITConnect’s Virtualization Solution

Businesses have never been under more pressure to reduce costs and operate more efficiently. Virtualization is one of the most effective means for making this happen. It provides powerful, tangible ways to streamline many traditionally time-consuming processes and minimize the resources needed to deploy and manage IT resources.

The most frequently discussed virtualization benefits relate to servers. By virtualizing servers, you can address the problems with underutilized and difficult-to-manage hardware, excessive power consumption, and the expensive space required to house servers in datacenters and branch offices. This leads to tremendous savings in several areas. The first and most visible is from direct server consolidation.

Server Consolidation Savings

By running multiple virtual machines on fewer physical servers, NITConnect’s customers are drastically cutting hardware requirements and easing server management. For instance, using Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center consolidated 400 servers down to 100 servers. “We expect to consolidate an additional 75 servers using Hyper-V, which will lead to a cost savings of more than U.S. $325,000 annually,” says Robert McShinsky Senior Systems Administrator.

Electrical Power Savings

Many customers have realized similarly dramatic electrical savings, as Saxo Bank, as a result of server consolidation—which is a particularly important benefit in today’s climate of volatile power prices. Customer expects to save approximately 50 percent in annual power and cooling costs by consolidating its server environment with Hyper-V.

In a virtual environment, you can use System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 to automatically move selected applications to specified servers and move them back to their ‘home’ servers in the morning.”

Environmental Impact and Savings

Server virtualization can have a tremendous impact on green initiatives. By improving capacity utilization by consolidating underutilized servers, server virtualization not only lessens cooling requirements and kilowatts of power used, it reduces the environmental footprint for organizations.

In other words, the power consumption of the host OS does not substantially increase as guests are added. To put these savings into perspective, consider these actual measurements, which highlight the power consumption of 10 IIS Web servers compared to that of 10 IIS Virtual Servers running on Hyper-V.

Server Setup

Ave. Watts

kWh/year

Cost

KG of CO2

Standalone IIS x 10

5,001

43,839

$4,007

34,084

One Hyper-V server with 10 IIS7 VMs

512

4,490

$410

3,491

Savings

4,489

39,349

$3,597

30,593

Space Savings

Burgeoning server farms can also be expensive to house. But consolidating servers through virtualization can save valuable space in your datacenter and branch offices, and further reduce operational costs.

Getting Started with Server Virtualization: MAP and HyperGreen Toolkits

Getting started on realizing these savings is now easier than ever with NITConnect which will implement the Microsoft solution.

After you have determined how many servers you plan to consolidate, you can figure out how much energy you’ll save and the environmental impact of those savings.

Extending Server Virtualization Benefits with Rapid Provisioning

Once your servers are virtualized, they are much easier and less expensive to deploy by using System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008.

“In the past this would require deploying a new physical server, which could take three weeks because of the time involved in purchasing and setting up the server. With Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager, we now have the templates and ability to provision in a much shorter timeframe,”

Saving Money with Desktop Virtualization

Clearly, NITConnect customers are saving substantial amounts of money with server virtualization. However, they are also realizing dramatic cost reductions on the desktop side with application and presentation virtualization. Customers are speeding application deployments, simplifying OS migrations, and accelerating time-to-access applications for users across the enterprise—all of which translate to less labor and money required for desktop management.

Customers are also realizing savings with Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services, which separates where an application or desktop is used from where it is run. This enables customers to consolidate applications and data in the datacenter while providing broad access to local and remote users.

Amplifying Savings and Value with Microsoft’s Platform Approach to Virtualization

Because of virtualization’s proven ability to save our customers money and lay the foundation for a more dynamic IT environment, NITConnect with Microsoft implementation built it into its core platform offerings. By making machine virtualization ubiquitous on the server and application virtualization ubiquitous on the desktop, and by deeply integrating virtualization into our end-to-end management solution, NITConnect uniquely makes virtualization part of the everyday IT environment.

Windows Server 2008 is replete with tools and capabilities that streamline processes and enable customers to maximize the value gained from virtualization technologies.

Clustering

Because host-to-host clustering is also built into Windows Server 2008, making Virtual Machines highly available is easy to implement and less costly to manage. By implementing clustering with Hyper-V, VMs will automatically failover between cluster nodes in the event of a host downtime. Hyper-V leverages Windows Server 2008 clustering to provide migration capabilities, which enable virtual machine guests to migrate from one cluster node to another with little downtime.

Energy Efficiency

The U.S. Department of Energy has said that the datacenter is the fastest-growing energy consumer in the United States today. While power consumption is often viewed as a hardware issue, NITConnect with Microsoft implementation has made significant engineering investments to ensure that Windows Server 2008 uses energy efficiently, helping reduce power costs for our customers. As a result, Windows Server 2008 uses approximately 10 percent less energy than Windows Server 2003 running an identical workload.

Integrated Solution for Managing Entire Environment

If making it easy for customers to implement virtualization is important, making it easy to manage the environment is just as critical for saving time and money. With NITConnect’s implementation of Microsoft System Center, customers have a single solution for managing the entire IT lifecycle, from deployment and provisioning, to monitoring and back-up. Equally important, you can manage both server and desktop resources, both virtual and physical assets, and both Microsoft and third-party hypervisors, all with the same platform.

Even disaster recovery capabilities are built into the Microsoft solution, helping you improve productivity during unplanned downtime and minimize the financial impact of IT outages.

Another example where virtualization is integrated into the management platform is with System Center Configuration Manager 2007 R2, which allows you to deploy both physical and virtual applications from the same console.

Customers Save on Training and Support

With virtualization built into the Microsoft platform, virtualization becomes a skill rather than a specialty. Now that you no longer need separate processes or IT teams to manage and support virtualization solutions, you can save time—and money—across the board. Customers agree that this is a crucial advantage.

Conclusion: Three Ways to Save Money

You can save a tremendous amount of time, energy and money using virtualization. First, leverage the inherent savings that server and desktop virtualization provide through consolidation, reductions in power, space, and CO2 emissions, and by accelerating provisioning processes. Then, increase these savings through Microsoft’s built-in platform approach, which incorporates virtualization into our operating system and management offerings, making it part of your everyday IT environment. And, finally, take advantage of NITConnect’s innovative pricing and licensing programs, which help you, minimize acquisition and ownership costs, making virtualization an even more compelling option for your business.

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